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of a middle-class
Victorian home, with a large gilt mirror over a fireplace, and central round table. It depicts the moment when the family's domestic bliss is broken, with many details echoing the sudden change in circumstances. A woman lies prostrate on the green carpet before her husband, fallen
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In the central piece the husband discovers his wife's infidelity; he dies five years afterwards. The two lateral pictures represent the same moment of night a fortnight after his death. The same little cloud is under the moon. The two children see it from the chamber in which they are praying for
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At the original 1858 exhibition, the first painting – the discovery in the drawing-room – was hung flanked by the two other paintings, which depict parallel scenes several years later. When originally exhibited, the central painting was raised slightly above the flanking images.
253:'s daughters.) The rear wall of the room, decorated with a rich red wallpaper, also bears two portraits, one on either side of the fireplace and mirror: the wife's portrait hangs to the left, above the playing children but beneath a picture of the expulsion of
269:(labelled "Abandoned"). The mirror shows the open door, through which the wife is soon to depart. The packed bag and umbrella by the door may underline her imminent departure, or could have been cast down by the husband when he arrived home.
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in 1858 the paintings were untitled, but accompanied by a fictional quotation from a diary, "August the 4th – Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents. I hear
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on a middle-class
Victorian family. The artist leaves the viewer to determine whether the woman should be condemned or pitied. The paintings reflected fears that public morality and family life were imperiled by the recent
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by Tom Parry, both tales of unhappy marriages, and also "Pleasure excursions to Paris", perhaps a reference to the novel by Balzac in the first picture. She looks up from her place in the gutter to the moon and stars above.
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The second painting shows a night scene, several years later, in a dark and sparsely-furnished bedroom shortly after the death of the heartbroken husband. The children are older now: the younger one kneels in a white
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The third painting is also a night scene. The details of the cloud and moon show it is the same evening as depicted in the second painting. The fallen wife is resting in the detritus-strewn shadows beneath the
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on the table, stabbed through its worm-ridden core by a small knife; the other half has fallen to the floor beside the wife. The family's two daughters are playing to the left of the painting, but their
307:. She clutches a bundle of rags from which protrude the emaciated legs of an infant, perhaps the fruit of her affair, either asleep or dead. Posters on the wall advertise two contemporary plays,
91:, which is not known to have been used by the artist, and is first recorded in the auction catalogue for Egg's works after his death in 1863. It is surmised that it derives from a misreading of
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as if in a swoon, hands clasped together, with her gold serpent bracelet resembling manacles. He sits dumbfounded, clutching a letter which reveals her adultery, his left foot resting on a
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209:. The number order does not represent the way they were exhibited (the first scene was shown in the centre), but rather an implied conventional
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August the 4th - Have just heard that B— has been dead more than a fortnight, so his poor children have now lost both parents.
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Charlotte
Mitchell, ‘Panton, Jane Ellen (1847–1923)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
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in 1918 by Sir Alec and Lady Martin in memory of their daughter Nora, and are now usually given the rather prosaic titles
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Each painting measures 63.5 centimetres (25.0 in) by 76.2 centimetres (30.0 in). They were all donated to the
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by moving jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts to the civil court, and made divorce a realistic prospect for the
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was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!".
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was seen on Friday last near the Strand, evidently without a place to lay her head. What a fall hers has been!
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of social decline from middle-class prosperity through genteel poverty and, finally, to destitution.
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of her lover. An apple has been cut into two pieces; one half remains beside the husband's glossy
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their lost mother, and their mother, from behind a boat under a vault on the river shore.
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T. J. Edelstein, 'Augustus Egg's
Triptych: A Narrative of Victorian Adultery',
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The triptych depicts the discovery and disastrous consequences of a wife's
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Culture and adultery: the novel, the newspaper, and the law, 1857-1914
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Pictorial
Victorians: the inscription of values in word and image
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Ruskin's "Academy Notes" (8 May 1858) described the three works:
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A similarly watery destination for fallen women was depicted in
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A Dramatic
Reading of Augustus Leopold Egg’s Untitled Triptych
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Affairs of the hearth: Victorian poetry and domestic narrative
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in 1858, which are designed to be exhibited together as a
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24:is the title usually given to the series of three
464:Woman and the demon: the life of a Victorian myth
87:. It is not certain how they acquired the title
77:based on a single moment – were influenced by
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472:The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns
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241: – built on top of a novel by
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451:, Barbara Leckie, pp. 73–76.
435:, Julia Thomas, pp. 145–159.
521:Collection of the Tate galleries
443:, Marcia R. Pointon, p. 51.
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459:, Rod Edmond, pp. 114–115
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481:, Tate Papers, Spring 2007
36:. When first exhibited at
516:Paintings by Augustus Egg
440:Pre-Raphaelites re-viewed
84:The Awakening Conscience
497:, CXXV/961 (April 1983)
494:The Burlington Magazine
416:Past and Present, No. 3
403:Past and Present, No. 2
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357:The Bridge of Sighs
211:Hogarthian progress
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124:No. 1 - Misfortune
349:Drowned! Drowned!
317:The Cure for Love
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505:Categories
424:Short Text
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363:References
313:Tom Taylor
199:Misfortune
526:Triptychs
303:, by the
282:nightgown
257:from the
249:, one of
335:GF Watts
325:Rossetti
263:The Fall
55:adultery
49:Painting
34:triptych
28:made by
309:Victims
234:top hat
207:Despair
161:I hear
64:divorce
243:Balzac
205:, and
203:Prayer
420:Image
407:Image
394:Image
330:Found
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247:Jane
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